With a little over two weeks left in its crowdfunding campaign, folks are already declaring Hasbro’s largest Transformer ever, War for Cybertron Unicron, to be dead.

I knew him, Hot Rod! (Credit: Hasbro)

Not so fast. Let’s poke some holes in the complaints being leveraged against the planet-eater.

I’ve been burned by crowdfunding before

By now we’ve gotten used to those campaigns that seem to rocket to funding within hours of launch. But then years later, we’re still waiting for fulfillment as the creators try to figure out how to deliver (either because they’re underfunded, overextended, or both).

Hasbro is different. The company isn’t a creator with flashy concept artwork and a few resin miniatures. They have an established supply chain. They’ve engineered the prototype. They know exactly what it will take to get Unicron from the designer table into the waiting hands of 8,000 fans. And they have an established production chain ready to make it happen.

It’s too much money

$575 is a lot for a Transformer. There’s no getting around that. And it’s that price that has caused the most grumbling. But when you consider that this is brand new tooling, that the final product is over 2 feet tall, that it will weigh 19 pounds, that only those who back the campaign will have the chance to own Unicron…the cost starts to make more sense.

After all, Star Wars fans paid $500 for an enormous recreation of Jabba’s Sail Barge, and that didn’t even transform. Considering the complexity of an equally enormous Transformers collectible, an extra $75 is a very small price to pay.

I mean, just watch this video of Unicron’s transformation (revealed last week). The engineering involved in making this such a satisfying figure is staggering.

No one is backing it anyway

Just like Megatron being reformatted from a barely living husk into Galvatron, it’s the final days of a crowdfunding campaign that determine its fate. The threat of failure is enough to prod those who have been waiting on the sidelines to take action and throw in their pledge. But we won’t get to that point.

The Unicron project currently has 30% of the backers it needs to be successful. With over two weeks left in the campaign, that’s more than enough time to get to 50%. At that point, you’ll see something magical happen (like Bombshell getting turned into Scourge and Cyclonus).

Once the campaign gets over the 50% hump, pledges will pick up. In fact, if you take a look at the numbers for the previous HasLab campaign, it wasn’t until the final week that it reached its funding goal (then it crushed it by an additional 3,000 backers).

Your bargaining position is dubious

Don’t talk to me or me…oh, never mind, I’m just going to eat him. (Credit: Hasbro)

Long story short? Unicron is getting made. Hasbro has invested a lot of time and a lot of resources into getting the planet eater just right. And they haven’t even revealed everything the figure can do yet. Take the moveable eyes feature, as seen in the latest campaign video:

It’s, not exactly mind blowing, right? BUT what if the pupils were LEDs? Suddenly the ability to shift Unicron’s gaze becomes a lot more interesting. Be ready for Hasbro to lift the curtain on hidden features like that in the next two weeks.

You can follow the updates and back Transformers: War for Cybertron Unicron today on HasLab.